Download or read book Necessity, Essence, and Individuation written by Alan Sidelle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.